


compass rose

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Brotherhood, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Food, Friendship, Gen, Inspired by Discord, Inspired by food, Introspection, ah the great outdoors, caring for others, elemental allusions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 14:45:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15731562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Four boys on a road trip. Four ways of showing care. Four ways of looking out for one another.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter breakdown:
> 
> Ignis, earth -- chapter inspired by https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/skillet-peach-cobbler  
> Noctis, water -- chapter inspired by https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/bacon-wrapped-trout  
> Gladio, fire -- chapter inspired by https://www.tasteandtellblog.com/pound-cake-berry-campfire-skillet-dessert/  
> Prompto, air -- chapter inspired by https://www.the-girl-who-ate-everything.com/walking-tacos
> 
> (Now that I think of it: maybe don't read this on an empty stomach????) (Oh my gods I did it again!)

He’s got the duty -- self-imposed, really, because he really doesn’t trust any of the others not to get distracted by anything happening beneath the wide sky and all of its moods -- of hauling the two large coolers out of the trunk of the Regalia, and most days it’s not a hard task at all. He may take a little bit of pride in the fact that between him and Gladio, the younger two had learned a little bit about foraging in the wild for edibles -- he blessed his friend’s insight of turning the whole thing into a mild competition with outlandishly large rewards, and so, there’s no shortage of carefully bagged mushrooms, of neat bundles of herbs labeled in angular scrawling handwriting as to when they’d been gathered, the occasional treat of a fruit that had only needed a little time off the branch to turn ripe.

And he steals one of the peaches now, just for himself, just so he can lose his mind a little, small controlled release. Sweetness almost to the very breaking point of too soft and too mushy and overripe -- just a day or two before it loses all of its savor, and he’s not shy about licking the juices from his hands because after all, he’s alone at the campsite. The others have run off to -- do necessary things. Hunt, and fish, and forage, and he’s here with their supplies and the somewhat stretchy, somewhat fluid logic of groceries.

A meager larder despite its weight: and they’re three weeks from the nearest traces of humans and shop inventories and actual bedding laid on an actual bedframe. They’ve been lucky, Ignis thinks. Lucky they’re still skirting fertile plains. The hushed huddled spaces of old forests, and rivers singing their gurgling bright songs. Lucky there are still a few more weeks of long days ahead of them: some part of him counts the hours of daylight and tucks those numbers away, like some kind of hope, like some kind of charm against what he knows might be the dwindling of the world.

Dark thoughts, as he eats delicately around the peach pit and -- well -- he knows about picking peaches but he’s a little fuzzier on planting them, on where they may need to grow. 

He deposits the cooler on the ground. 

The wind stirs the brush and the tiny peering eyes of flowers springing up around dark glossy blades of grass. Little pointed petals, pastel blue and violet and a shade that’s the exact faded middle ground between yellow and white. 

He pulls out the flask at his hip and thoughtfully rinses off his peach pit with a splash of water, that he angles so the drops fall onto the grass too. Hollows out a depression the size of his own hand, in the rich soil that leaves reddish-brown stains on his fingertips, and -- it’s a silly thing, perhaps. Plants aren’t part of the protocols that he’s learned, and this may all be so much wasted effort.

Or the seed may feed some other animal that lives in these places. That will be his own small way of giving a little back to the land that he’s living off of, now.

So Ignis lays his peach pit in the hollow he’s made, and he covers it over and he won’t have any way of knowing if he can come back and check on any kind of progress, if the pit survives, if it germinates, if it gets eaten, if it gets lost, if it dies.

That’s just how it goes and that’s what he knows.

Hands dusted off and cleaned once again with a little more water, and he carries the cooler into the shade of the nearest stand of trees, peach-scent catching in his teeth, on the tip of his tongue. The smell of the earth beneath his fingernails.


	2. Chapter 2

There are a lot of things he doesn’t know about this world and -- maybe it’s a little bit unfair to expect him to know so much, for the simple reason that he hasn’t been around all that long. Nineteen years. No matter how he looks at it he knows it’s a damn short period of time. 

The things he thinks of when he’s walking through shallow water. Wading, really; he’d discarded his boots and dropped them back into the Armiger about fifteen minutes back. The water smells like green things, like the dart and the bright colors of the little fish skittering along the shore. He thinks of them eating little bits of leaves and grass and the flowers growing thick and fragrant on the shore and he snickers, a little -- better them than him -- he doesn’t fish for the little ones, anyway. 

Big game is what he’s here for today.

Big game with rainbow-glittering light on the scales, with their blunt heads and the strange differences in the lengths of their jaws. Deep red flesh beneath the silvery skin, that should turn coral-hued on the fire, giving off greasy delicious smoke, and he’s maybe having to swallow a little, and wipe his mouth. Hungry already and he hasn’t even cast a single line.

But that’s less of a problem than it should be: here he is in a river full of fish and there’ll be no one to share them with except for three other guys, three other shadows growing long on the road as he walks with them.

Noctis smiles, and maybe that’s part of what he’s been thinking of, too: nineteen years is a short time to be alive, and nineteen years is a short time to be with friends. With brothers, really, especially when he thinks of Ignis -- who’s not subtle at all, and he laughs some more, thinking of that prim starched collar and that perfectly draped jacket -- but also of the eyes keenly watching the bag of fruit, almost as if he’s ready to gut and fillet anyone who tries to steal from him. When he thinks of Gladio -- and Noctis saw through him nearly the very instant he’d proposed the foraging “competitions”, and he’d gone along because he’d quickly understood the problems of keeping four guys -- four bottomless pits, sometimes -- fed, out in the wild. 

When he thinks of Prompto -- whom he’d left some way up the river, in the place where he’d thrown himself into a hollow of roots and grass. Rolling around like some kind of funny baby animal, leaves and twigs getting caught in his hair, but also something oddly calm in the lines around his eyes, around his mouth. That had been the reason why Noctis had grinned, and winged a salute at him, and taken off his boots.

Sunlight rimmed with the long cool shaded shapes of the trees overhead, when he finally comes to a stop and there’s even a boulder perched right on the shore, wide and flat and cracked and smooth to the touch, and he doesn’t need to warp to it -- he climbs for the pleasure of climbing, even if the tackle box and the rod threaten to trip him up on the way -- and now he can see, from his new vantage point, the shapes he’s been looking for in the fast-flowing central currents of this broad river. The play of reflected light off sleek shapes darting every which way.

Noctis grins, pulls his gloves on, pulls his cap low. There’s a sandwich and a bottle of juice somewhere in the Armiger if he needs them, but -- there’s also this, the peace of this particular task, this particular hunt that only needs him to spend his time -- that only needs him to think about the trajectory of the hook, the arc of the line, the weight on the reel.

This, he knows.


	3. Chapter 3

In the last hours, in the last minutes of the stars streaking out of the sky, fading and fading as the eastern horizon begins to glow -- faintly at first and growing stronger with each passing moment -- he pours out the last brackish cup of the previous day’s coffee, and gets to his feet.

The book’s not so bad, Gladio thinks, though he knows what he would have done, if he’d been anywhere near Insomnia. Anywhere near home. If he’d been reading that book in the carpet-and-drapes hush of his father’s study, he’d have thought about sitting at the desk and writing a letter to the author. 

Well, there’s nothing to be done in the here and now: no paper, no pens, and no stamps. And he’s not going to resort to email in order to send any messages out -- not the most genteel way of going about it.

So he’ll have to spend these small hours doing something else and, fortunately, he does know that there’s something else he can do: and it won’t kill them to have a different kind of breakfast, if it means Ignis can take a load off and spend a proper hour or two in the morning waking up, instead of having to rush headlong into it.

The cooler’s where it always is, and he can’t stop himself from snaffling some of the same berries he’s looking for, where they’ve been tucked into a small and neat bundle just neatly caged in by the bags of rice and sugar. Not so they’d be crushed, but so that they’d stay in place, snug and unmoved even if the unthinkable happens and the cooler gets dropped again.

Farther down are the long sealed packages of things like bacon and jerky, the jars of fish packed in oil, the emergency stash of protein bars that he doesn’t even want to think about and he doesn’t even want to remember them. He doesn’t want to think of the nights and the days in some dungeon or another, locked in by magic or pursuing enemies, and nowhere to rest or breathe or even crack a potion open, and the weight of those rations always sitting unspoken and unacknowledged in their actual pockets, not in the Armiger but in the real world, and getting broken into chunks every time.

He pushes those thoughts away. Here is the prize in the stash, wrapped in several thicknesses of brown paper, and then three layers of heavy foil. A gift from Iris, for some kind of theoretical emergency situation: a loaf of pound cake, nearly as thick around as Gladio’s own arm.

He cuts the loaf in half and returns the hefty package exactly where he’d found it, and he checks the seams in the folded paper and foil layers several times before he closes the lid of the cooler on it -- because who wants to eat fish-smelling pound cake? He shudders at the thought and consoles himself with another perfectly ripe berry, the gush of its seeds and juices spreading across his tongue as he chews slowly and thoughtfully.

Fire in the cook-box and the cast-iron skillet coming up to heat. The shadows around his feet are literally on the move, morning’s swift flight, the warmth of the sun catching on his shoulders as he cuts up the berries and tosses them in a bowl with a little sugar. The pound cake comes next, falling into crumbs and cubes underneath the knife, and he tosses a little butter into the skillet before dumping in the pieces of cake. 

The world wakes, slowly, and Gladio hums under his breath and his is the only voice in the world for a few more minutes, and -- lastly, he digs the bag of chocolate-covered nuts out of his duffel, to scatter over the cake and the berries, and as soon as he leaves breakfast warming on the burner, he sets off for his run, and for his exercises, and that letter he won’t write or send.


	4. Chapter 4

Just a little more. Just a little farther. Just a little faster, he thinks, and he can hear the click of the scales skidding after him, and -- he’s gotten used to the smells and to the sounds of the world. The lowering weights of the stars in the sky as the minutes tick toward midnight. The waft of smoke from sticks of wood and handfuls of leaves and tufts of grass, and chunks of ash-dusted charcoal that hold fire in their hearts. Water in its many forms, flowing around him: the rain that dashes off into long sheets of cold and wet against the windows of the Regalia, cruising along some unmarked unnamed highway, or the rivers that they actively look for -- not just so that Noctis can go fishing, or because they need the water basically to survive, but because for some reason the musical babble of the foaming currents can protect them from certain kinds of enemies.

Not so much this one, though, like a snake the size of an Astral, although Prompto thinks that might just be the idiot prey part of his brain going haywire. He’s seen Astrals, hasn’t he? -- or he’s seen one, anyway. The solemn lightning-forked fury of Ramuh, clouds streaming from a ragged white beard. They’d stumbled over some kind of running water that hadn’t been on any map they’d packed along with them and then -- the snake had reared and hissed and spat at them and -- that explained why it wasn’t on the maps, and now they’re working on being rid of it.

He hears the wind whistling in his hair, catching high and frightened in his teeth and in the back of his throat. Hears the hollering calls of the others where Noctis had grabbed them and warped with them across a narrow ravine, and the plan is, Prompto’s the bait and the others are calling so the snake doesn’t cotton on to the fact that they’re laying a trap for it. Planning to trap it in the ravine and finish it off where it can’t maneuver or move much, its oversized bulk theoretically far too large for the dimensions of the canyon.

Which leaves Prompto, running for his fucking life and once again he takes a blind flying leap off the jagged outthrust point of a rock, adrenaline-clogged flight, and -- the thing is he’d come up with the plan, shouting it at the others as they’d fought the treacherous twisting coils of the thing, and they’d all looked at him funny before they’d run and now, and now, they’re safe and he needs to get to safety with them, and -- his stomach chooses that moment to start rumbling.

Right. What had they forgotten? Lunch, of course, and breakfast had been at the crack of dawn and -- unless Prompto misses his guess and he’s nowhere near the elegant huge watch on Noctis’s wrist, it’s well past noon and he’s hungry, he’s faltering, his body burning up far too much of his energy in the chase and the hurtle and the fight of this long damn morning.

What he wouldn’t give for -- walking tacos, he thinks. He’s got a particular recipe for them, he’s carried that recipe with him all the way from high school and -- funny, that the recipe had passed Ignis’s close scrutiny, Gladio’s baffled surprise. Maybe they’d expected him to dump more junk into a snack-sized bag of garbage calories -- not something that was closer to an actual salad. 

He tries to recite the ingredients to himself so he doesn’t have to think about the snake chasing him, getting ever closer -- fresh tomatoes halfway between cubed and chopped. Red bell peppers, likewise. Can of corn kernels, drained. Avocado when he can get it, but he can only count those occasions on the fingers of one hand. Shredded lettuce, shredded cheeses, a pound of ground meat cooked and seasoned and mixed with a little too much chili seasoning, and no beans. He’s not a fan of those. 

Maybe the others will make him a really nice and really big lunch, he thinks, as he finally catches sight of the rim of the canyon -- Noctis on the other side, shouting and blurring into blue-sharp light and heading his way, and Prompto tries to grin, tries to lunge for him, one last short bit of distance --

**Author's Note:**

> ninemoons42 on Tumblr: [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)


End file.
